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Mick Davis is sticking to his guns over his proposal for a nil-premium merger between Xstrata and Anglo American. And well he might. The gap between the two mega-miners in terms of market capitalisation is tantalisingly close to zero.
But Davis should not think that this means a prolonged bear hug is going to persuade them to accept the miner's proposal.
Davis approached Anglo when the market caps of the two companies had almost converged, following a rise in Xstrata's share price and a fall in Anglo's. Following the offer, the gap widened in anticipation of a premium from Xstrata or a white knight bid from another mining group. So far neither has materialised and the gap has closed again.
Now Anglo and Xstrata have both reported first-half earnings, Anglo, valued at 25.6 billion pounds ($43.4 billion), is trading at a premium of roughly 5 percent to its antagonist.
Xstrata thinks its offer to split the $1 billion of merger savings it believes it can extract down the middle is fair because (whisper it softly) Anglo is poorly managed. Of course Davis can't say this openly because the deal is "friendly" but the focus on efficiencies and savings is designed to make the argument for him. Meanwhile, Anglo's riposte is to stress its own cost-cutting prowess.
It told investors that it expected to be ahead of schedule on its plan to extract $2 billion of stand-alone savings by 2011. Efficient, see?
Moreover, Anglo is arguing that Xstrata has timed its pounce at a moment when two important subsidiaries -- Anglo Platinum and De Beers -- are cyclically depressed. These two entities are collectively worth an estimated $15 billion, more than a quarter of Anglo's $58 billion enterprise value. Xstrata's focus on coal -- where sales have surged because of Chinese demand -- has conversely helped inflate its value.
Davis recognises the pivotal role that Anglo's newly-appointed chairman John Parker will have in deciding how this battle plays out, pointing out that Parker needs time to look at the business he is inheriting before making any move.
Anglo's shareholders may not be pushing Parker to invite Davis into immediate talks, but they will want to know how easy it will be to fix these assets, whether their value can be pushed up substantially, and whether the group has the management to deliver this.
If Parker can't come up with a convincing answer, that may again raise questions about Anglo's future as a standalone business. At that point, Davis may have another bite at the cherry.
It is significant that Parker hasn't forced Davis to "put up or shut up" in UK bid parlance and either make a bid or push off for six months. Perhaps he sees value in having Xstrata as an option to get Anglo's chief executive Cynthia Carroll working her socks off to turn Anglo round.

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The 1980s revival continues. Music fans have been flocking to see the Human League and Spandau Ballet on their reunion tours. Now M&A aficionados can savour their own mini revival. Yes, it's the return of the Pac-Man bid.
Two mid-sized British insurers, Friends Provident and Resolution have revived this gambit, named after a mind-bogglingly dull computer game where the objective is to eat your pursuers rather than be eaten yourself. In M&A, this involves the target of a bid approach (in this case, Friends) turning on the bidder and launching an offer itself.
In the case of Resolution there was a certain logic in so doing. Resolution is effectively a cash shell company, which has opaque governance. Its nil premium share for share approach offered little to Friends other than the chance to hand over 10 percent of the combined company's profits to Resolution's management. The proposed nil premium counterbid made little sense (other than to eliminate the 10 percent profit share). But it did at least tease out a slightly more generous bid proposal from Resolution.
Pac-Man defences are rare in M&A -- and for good reason. They're wholly unconvincing. If you get a bid for your company, and think that the combination has merit, squabbling over who bids for whom seems to miss the point. At worst it smacks of management self interest.
This is not the only reason there have been very few Pac-Man defences. The bigger problem is that they are uniformly unsuccessful. The target never actually gets to gobble up the predator. It is 10 years since Elf Aquitaine's desperate attempt to see off an ultimately successful bid by fellow French oil major Total. The same year, British regional brewer Marston's also used the defence against a bid from Wolverhampton and Dudley Breweries. It too failed.
That doesn't stop it from rearing its ugly head from time to time. Pac-Man defences were raised as a possibility for Rio Tinto to turn the tables on BHP Billiton and more recently as a means for Anglo American to round on Xstrata. But generally that's all it is: talk.
The Resolution-Friends situation is an unusual one. Resolution is a cash company that is desperate to do a deal, while Friends rejected a 150 pence per share bid from J.C. Flowers last year. There are particular reasons they have ended up in a sort of death embrace. So while the Spandaus may be back in favour, the Pac-Man bid is likely to remain consigned to the archive.